PARIS — Though
François Hollande hasn’t defined with any precision his “war”
aims — much less begun to overcome the enormous diplomatic and
military obstacles in the way of his stated ambition to build a
“large coalition” against the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant (ISIL) — the French president’s strategy is taking clearer
shape less than a week after Friday’s terrorist attacks.

The first task
outlined by him this week is to break France’s isolation.

Hollande sees his
country as increasingly alone since the January attacks on Charlie
Hebdo. France is ISIL’s main target, and the European country that
takes the fight against it most seriously. It is also battling
Islamic radicals in several African countries.

The French president
said he would ask the United Nations’ Security Council to adopt a
resolution on fighting terrorism. He also invoked the little-known
Article 42.7 of the European Union treaty, under which a member
country that is the victim of armed aggression can request “aid and
assistance” from other EU countries.

European defense
ministers swiftly and unanimously agreed to the French request. It is
now up to Paris to decide what type of aid it wants — military,
material, or other — and up to other governments to decide whether
they want to accommodate France. But the EU has no standing army and
France already has the bloc’s most powerful military.

Russian outreach

Roping in the United
Nations’ Security Council is a more ambitious goal. Hollande wants
to build “a grand and unique coalition” for Syria, as he said in
his speech to Parliament, instead of the mish-mash of conflicting
strategic interests currently colliding in the region. To French
diplomats, that means Vladimir Putin’s Russia has to be brought
back into the fold of talks about the future of the country.

Putin has moved
swiftly since Friday, agreeing that both countries would coordinate
their military actions in Syria and instructing his generals that
France had to be considered “an ally.”

But France and
Russia have different goals on Syria. Putin is using his air force in
support of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Hollande still
wants the Syrian leader gone although he now says that the priority
is ISIL.

The Kremlin said
Tuesday that a bomb brought down a Russian civil airliner over the
Sinai peninsula last month. “That gives Putin an opportunity to
modify his stance without appearing to contradict himself,” says
Bruno Tertrais, a senior research fellow at Fondation pour la
Recherche Stratégique in Paris..

“But what’s
important is not that Putin is brought back from the wilderness,”
he adds. “There were plenty of informal talks going on with Russia
about what to do in the region.

Hollande wants to
back him up against the wall: If he really wants a coalition, now is
the time to join.”

The French
president’s ability to rally the world’s great powers and
France’s traditional Western allies beyond the expected statements
of empathy will be key to the success of his anti-ISIL strategy.

“Syria has become
the largest terrorist factory the world has ever known and the
international community — as I experienced many times — is
divided and incoherent,” he said in his speech to Parliament.

Can Hollande’s
proposals make the international community united and coherent
instead?

The governments
France is asking for support had little choice but to show empathy,
analysts said. But will they agree with the French president’s
statement that his country is “at war” with terrorism in general
and ISIL specifically?

Hollande is vague
about what he means by “war.” A dozen French warplanes have
staged bombing raids against ISIL, and the carrier Charles de Gaulle
is sailing towards the eastern Mediterranean, but there is no sign
that France wants to stage a ground invasion of the Syrian-Iraqi
borderlands. U.S. President Barack Obama has also ruled out a land
war against ISIL.

“Just because you
say ‘war’ doesn’t mean you necessarily expect the outcome to be
military,” Tertrais said. “‘War’ is a term used by any
statesman when his country is attacked.”

A French diplomat
said Hollande is unlikely to ask the Security Council to share his
“war” rhetoric — tacitly acknowledging that the term is being
used in the political sense.

Even from Hollande’s
viewpoint, the concept has its limits: The French position remains
that a ground offensive is precisely what ISIL seeks — a view
shared by many analysts. It “would galvanize jihadi recruitment and
violence all over the world,” Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of
Middle East studies at Sciences Po, wrote in POLITICO.

It is also still
unclear what kind a resolution France wants from the Security Council
— a vaguely-termed declaration of sympathy, or legal backing for
its airstrikes recognizing the country’s right of self-defense
under the U.N. charter?

Plus ça change

Beyond the first
reactions and shows of solidarity with Paris, the situation on the
ground may not have changed much in a couple of weeks compared to
what it was before the day of the terrorist attacks, analysts said.

“All the
expressions of sympathy will decrease by the day, said Jeremy
Shapiro, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former member of
the U.S. State Department’s policy planning staff. “In quite a
few capitals the feeling will be: ‘What’s so special about
France?’”

Shapiro recalls that
Spain in 2004, was hit by by what remains the worst Islamist attack
in European history. Ten bombs packed with nails exploded in four
trains, killing 191 people and injuring 1,800.

In Syria, airstrikes
will continue because this is required by the political situation
more than out of a hope that ISIL can be vanquished through
traditional military means, said the French diplomat.

Olivier Roy, a
French Islam scholar, recently wrote that “ISIS is its own worst
enemy,” in spite of appearances: Its territorial expansion is
coming to an end, and it has little support among the Muslims living
in Europe. That, however, doesn’t mean it will go away quickly.

That’s why, even
if everything goes according to Hollande’s plan in the next months,
the French president and his American, Russian and European
counterparts will be back to the original question of how to deal
politically with the Syrian quagmire, said Pierre Conesa, a strategic
affairs scholar and former French defense ministry official.

At some point, he
says, the West may want to realize that “it’s not its war “and
that “at the heart of the problem is Salafism as promoted and
financed by Saudi Arabia.

That is clearly not
on the immediate agenda of the French government. Foreign minister
Laurent Fabius told Parliament Wednesday that France’s U.N.
resolution draft would ask for measures against “the states
financing terrorism.” A day after Hollande had lunch with Qatar
prime minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani, he
quickly added he had no evidence Saudi Arabia or any Gulf states were
doing so.